David Maljkovic

February 15th - August 3rd 2014, LOK

David Maljković studied in Zagreb and at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Over the past few years, his works have been exhibited at some of the most important institutions in the world, including the Reina Sofia in Madrid, P.S. 1 in New York, the Whitechapel Gallery in London and the Biennials in Berlin 2008, Istanbul 2009 and São Paulo 2010. From mid February 2014 the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen will be exhibiting large-scale installations and new photographic works by the artist at the Lokremise venue.

David Maljković was born in the Croatian town of Rijeka in 1973 and is now based in Zagreb. His multimedia works address the legacy of the former Yugoslavia, the Utopia of a lost era and the promises of a failed modernity. The cultural changes bound up in the collapse of social orders and the triumph over modernity as meaningful entities form the background to his œuvre, which, at the same time, questions the methods of narrative constructions: «In my artistic practice, the structuring of the chosen themes is far more important than the themes themselves, but of course a theme can grab a person’s attention and lead him or her onto an external level.» (David Maljković)

n previous years the artist has brought collages, videos and installations to the art scene, in which he examines the political legacy of the former Yugoslavia and the Utopia of a lost era. Scene for new heritage 1, for example, explicitly addresses the failed modernity of the 1960s and 70s and the repression mechanisms in dealing with the artist’s own past: The monument to the Yugoslav partisans in Voijn Bakić, now visible as a ruin, is applied uniquely as a backdrop to another vision of the future, as the artist acts altogether like an archaeologist, examining a wealth of forms coming from a failed modernity as potential for the present.